I'd like to think that HLN's Nancy "I've Never Met a Defendant I didn't Loathe" Grace as the epitome of irrelevancy. I never watched her much, and not at all since the days when her current network was named Headline News, and she appeared at that time on what was then Court TV. The few times I did catch her on the tube, she almost without fail got my blood pressure spiking. It seemed her most common schtick was to "report" on a pending criminal case by reciting a litany of damning surmises, her tone escalating in fevered outrage with each bullet point. On the rare occasion a guest would attempt to modulate the tenor of the "hang 'em high and soon" narrative, Grace would push back, often citing her own experience as a prosecutor, judge, and/or crime victim. (As a young woman, she had suffered the admittedly tragic loss of her fiance' to a murderer, which explains much but excuses little.)
You might well ask, "So what does this have to do with Anita Bryant?" In fact, gay bashing is so far afield from Grace's usual choice of scripts, that I have never even once wondered what her attitude on the rights of sexual minorities might be. I suppose, if pressed, I would have assumed it to be one of flippant disregard, since such seems to be her attitude toward any and all civil rights and liberties. After all, she not once, but several times produced and hosted televised specials with Joe Arpaio, lauding him as "America's Favorite Sheriff."
But as angry as she has made me in the past, she most recently displayed an alternate view of reality that is so foreign that it goes well beyond what I can regard as a rational point of view. Using as a jumping off point, of all things, Brad Pitt's headlined prankster (whom she deemed a "stalker") she launched into a recitation of the 1977 incident in which Anita Bryant was struck in the face with a plate of whipped cream as a "pie in the face" protest.
I remember the incident well, and I'll tell you why, the reason I think Ms. Grace's version of history matters, and provide the clip of her program below.
Nancy Grace, as usual, provided a photo of an obviously humiliated Bryant with no context. The only "facts" she cited were those which fit her preconceived and patently false conclusion that Ms. Bryant, too, had been the innocent victim of a celebrity stalker, and even those facts don't match the historical record.
You see, 1977 was less than a decade after Stonewall. Nothing yet resembling a momentum for LGBT rights had emerged, though slow and steady progress was being made through hard fought battles for modest inroads. In my own progressive State of Oregon, sodomy laws finally had been repealed, and a single municipality had even passed a non-discrimination ordinance. If you think the state-by-state road to marriage equality has been painstaking and tedious in its duration, consider that the stage in the process at the time of Anita Bryant's emergence as the voice of the first organized opposition, was municipality by municipality -- and we had barely made it past the starting gate.
Her odious "Save the Children Campaign" (Wikipedia Entry) was well funded, got national exposure, and was succeeding in setting back the few gains we had made. Her scare tactics, including assertions that "homosexuals" (her term) were child rapists from whom the community needed to be protected, were working. And they continued to work for decades. Again, my own state's long awaited non-discrimination statute is only a few years old even now, and LGBT people can still be fired for being "out" in a majority of our states, as ENDA continues to languish in a dysfunctional Congress.
So, Ms. Grace's television performance is not merely an expression of opinion (even stated, as it is, as fact). It is a theft of a vital part of the history of our nation, and of the activists who risked much to gain some measure of equality and justice for their brothers and sisters. So, if you can stomach it, here's the clip of Ms. Grace's ludicrous defense of "that sweet lady," Ms. Anita Bryant, whose only crime, after all, was to take away the rights of a loathed minority: